Extra credit: Killer Joe and other men who hate women

Welcome to Extra Credit, where the Post’s David Berry provides the necessary cultural background to the shows, films, books and albums currently capturing the zeitgeist.Today:The misogyny of Killer Joe.

Killer Joe, the second Tracy Letts play that William Friedkin has adapted into a feature film, is a lot of things, few of them pretty. At its heart a pestilent and prurient trailer park noir, it mixes elements of hideous character study, dark comic family fraying and exploitation-level sex ‘n’ guns into an electric kind of art house trash. Matthew McConaughey’s titular character, a lawman/hitman with the code of neither, is an instantly chilling character who might be more at home possessing the innocent in Friedkin’s most notorious film.

Slithering under all this surface-level repugnance, though, is a different kind of ugliness. Because as bad as everyone in this film gets it, the film’s women are subject to an extra layer of dingy degradation. It’s the planned murder of a good-for-nothing mother, after all, that kicks off this horror show, and the statutory rape of a teenage girl that keeps Joe orbiting this doomed family. The few women characters in the movie split cleanly along a virgin/whore dynamic, and while one man in particular is at the end of some hellacious violence, without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that the women (the whore character especially) are the subjects of the most sadistic acts, from both the characters and the camera.

And yet it doesn’t seem strictly fair to condemn Killer Joe as misogynist. If anything, it seems to be blowing up the balloon of McConaughey’s sleazeball persona until it violently bursts, throwing his charm right back in the face of viewers, male and female, who have found him so appealing. On top of which, it’s also depicting a world where women are essentially this powerless.

And yet …

Regardless of where you might fall on the question, Killer Joe is hardly alone in dancing on the line of a repugnant attitude towards women. Especially when the spectre of violence is raised, it can be an uncomfortable thing to begin to contemplate in our art.

On screen: Antichrist, Lars Von Trier
Misogyny accusations have dogged Von Trier for much of his career, and not entirely without reason: from the effective death-via-sex of Breaking the Waves to the brutal debasement and actions of Nicole Kidman in Dogville, women are routinely the subjects of or responsible for some of the most heinous things in Von Trier’s films, all of it executed with the Danish provocateur’s delirious disregard for taste. But even those don’t hold a candle to Antichrist, his disturbing fantasia about a couple struggling to get over the death of their son. Openly littered with references to historical and religious beliefs about the evil of women — he even hired a “misogyny consultant” — it also features Charlotte Gainsbourg enacting almost every one of those arguments, culminating in a pair of scenes where no gender’s genitals are left unharmed. Antichrist drew fire and defence from both sides of the debate, which seems, as with any Von Trier film, to be the major point. Between its harsh psychological and physical violence and dark surrealist touches, it’s hard to tell if Von Trier is condemning humanity’s history, playing out its worst impulses, or merely just trying to run his own intellect through the gamut of his critics’ accusations.

In your headphones: ’97 Bonnie and Clyde / Kim, Eminem
In the early part of his career, Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, couldn’t turn around without sparking controversy, and a considerable part of that came from the public aspects of his relationship with his erstwhile wife, Kim. Possibly only Eminem’s mother took more verbal abuse across his first few albums, and its safe to say nothing about her was as dark as this suite of songs. Between the two, Kim is the more openly aggressive, though ’97 Bonnie and Clyde is ultimately far more disturbing: though Kim (which was released second, but occurs first chronologically) ends like a slasher film, it’s more a song of intense hurt, Eminem alternating cries of “I hate you” and “I love you” and so unhinged he can’t help but scream throughout — though in terms of misogynist violence, it’s certainly worse: not only does it finish with a slit throat, Eminem reportedly abused a Kim doll onstage during the song (among the actions that almost got him banned from entering Canada on the album’s tour).

’97 Bonnie and Clyde, on the other hand, is calm to the point of juvenile sarcasm, played as it is as a kind of father-daughter bonding trip, Em’s baby language adding disturbing layers of familial closeness (and serial killer detach) to the story of dumping his wife’s body in a lake while his daughter sits in the car. The openly violent tendencies would seem to justify the charges of misogyny, but it’s worth nothing that, unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Eminem reserves his contempt, however grandiose, for one very specific woman (well, two, with his mother): he’s quite tender toward his daughter, has disavowed some of his harsher statements even in his own songs and rarely displays the kind of passive sexism that infests a lot of rap. Perhaps these songs are just his horror-movie way of working through what both parties admit was a toxic relationship, though it’s probably fair to say that’s no excuse for some of the images here. Either way, to cleanse your palate: in one of life’s small ironies, ’97 Bonnie and Clyde did spark a response song that depicts one of rap’s healthiest relationships, and counts as one of the genre’s best love songs to boot.

On the page: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
At first blush, at least, it seems ridiculous to include Larsson, the crusading journalist-turned-mystery writer, on this list. The literal translation of the Swedish title of the first book in his bestselling trilogy, after all, was Men Who Hate Women, and his iconic character was reportedly inspired as a kind of penance for a scene from his youth involving a friend’s rape where he didn’t intervene. There’s an old saying about the road to hell, though: Larsson is decidedly not trying to get us to sympathize with the misogynists who make up both the industrialist Vanger clan and the powerful men in Lisbeth Salander’s life, the scenes of violence against women are both prevalent and not without their exploitative touches, condemning even as the flirt with indulging their worst impulses. Then there is Lisbeth herself, who seems to be a case of overcompensation: an attractive, tough-as-nails, world-class hacker, she is more action hero than feminist one — and, oh, P.S., she’s a bisexual goth who is only too happy to first bed and then moon over the dashing journalist character. Here, Larsson’s heart is in the right place, but he can’t entirely escape his own middle-aged leer.